Welcome to my space to ramble on about the need for evidence, kindness, and critical analysis in medicine. This Medium page isn't much, but I hope that you find it a thoughtful journey through the complexities of modern healthcare. It all started when I was encouraged to share my memoir about growing up in anti-vaccination culture. From the moment I was born my life was shaped by the denial of modern medicine, what many call allopathic medicine. Couple this with a harsh form of evangelicalism and you have the recipe for a rather "separatist" childhood.
As my family became what one could call doomsday preppers I began to deconstruct my own beliefs, ever curious about the world that surrounds me. Through a stroke of luck and ironically the push of my family I became an EMT, joining alongside allopathic practitioners in the provision of emergency medical care. It was here that I learned the difficulties of medical practice and the need for evidence, not simply my own amount of belief in something, to guide my decisions. Soon though I began to sense the difficulty of actually doing this in the messiness of the real word. It seemed like getting evidence "from the bench to the bedside" was fraught with complexity; this turned out to be correct. Over the last few decades promises of a more evidence-based medicine have been meagerly fulfilled, but there is still more work to do.
After a brief career as a paramedic I knew medicine was for me. By this time my evangelical beliefs and anti-vaccination dogmas were thoroughly deconstructed. Not one to accept things prima facie I began to deconstruct medicine. The questions that drive me are primarily epistemic; I want to explore the reasons that we as allopathic practitioners can justify our knowledge. More than this I want to help our growing problem with the mistrust of society's institutions. Couple this with a my love of philosophy and discovery of philosophy of science/medicine in undergraduate and you have a future physician who wants a medicine full of evidence, values, and more than anything, the human capacity towards kindness.
In March of 2022 I became a fellow of the Patient Revolution, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the awareness of industrial medicine's harms and what can be done to encourage careful and kind care in our communities, hospitals, and world.
Stay tuned for more posts as I head into medical school and continue deconstructing my past full of strange beliefs, dogged certainty, and a whole heap of pseudoscience. If you've come for thoughtful critiques of misinformation alongside frank discussion of uncertainties in medical decision-making then you are in the right place.
